The BlackHearted
by girlwithpurplehair
Summary: Max and the flock have just escaped from the Itex headquarters in Lendeheim, Germany. As life sweeps them up in yet another trial, sacrifices must be made. The question is, are there some things that cannot be sacrificed?


I sighed, standing up and brushing the dirt from the knees of my ripped jeans. It was a pointless gesture; dirt was ingrained into what remained of the knees of my jeans, colouring the stained threads brown and making the worn denim rough under my fingers. It was a movement of habit, a simple comfort. There was comfort in routine – a comfort me and mine were not very familiar with. Routine doesn't have much place in the lives of fugitives from various government sectors, so unless you counted glancing over your shoulder every few seconds as a routine, we were out of the loop.

Still, we held on to what we could. Iggy cooked when he could – when we had the food, in other words – Nudge sang softly to herself as she brushed out her sadly matted dark curls, Angel patiently went through Total's fur to remove all the debris of our less-than-pristine way of life, and Gasman... well, he was Gasman. We all lived with it.

And every morning we woke up to the sound of Fang tapping away at his computer keyboard, alerting the world to our presence.

I stood reflecting on all of it at the edge of the cliff, looking out over the wide expanse of water stretching away from us like a flat blue carpet, less blue than all the movies made out. It was more of a mirror of the steely grey sky, dotted almost decoratively with small white peaks of foam, as if God had accidentally smeared the picture a little while he worked and then run out of time to fix it. I liked the sea, I'd discovered. I'd seen it before; gone so much as to save it before. We'd done a lot of that. Working to right the wrongs done to the planet; done to us. The wings we'd been genetically modified and tampered with to accommodate were a gift in many ways, but the methods used to grafted them to our bodies and acclimatise us to our strange existence were as far from a gift as was comprehensible. Perhaps further. Of course, very little of our training – and torture – within the confines of the government compounds had done us any good out here in the real world, and, predictably, it had caused more complications than any average person could ever dream of even contemplating, let alone surviving.

Lucky them, right?

It seemed that way a lot of the time. But I always thought more clearly when I looked out over the cool grey sea, the same unobstructed clarity I experienced sometimes in the midst of a long flight. It was the feeling of soaring, of freedom, of air beneath my spreading wings when I was lifted up over the world. I didn't know what it was about the sea, but it slowed my heartbeat and pushed the usual clamour of my brain to the edges, so that thoughts came clearer and more coherent. These were the times when I realised that, terrible as the things that we'd encountered and endured over the years had been, as unimaginably horrible as those times had been, and as much as I would not wish those years on any other living being – it had brought me my family. And I would die for them.

"You're thinking awfully hard."

If it had been anyone else, I might have been so surprised that I'd have toppled over the edge of the cliff, and put my wide wingspan to good use. But Fang's low, unobtrusive voice had become so familiar to me that now, when he spoke – even when he snuck up on me with his silent step and quiet, serious presence – it was almost as if his voice were a part of my subconscious. And your own mind can't sneak up on you, right?

Well, unless you had a Voice, like I had – but that had turned out to belong to my father. But Fang wasn't like Jeb. And his messages were different too. Thank God.

I turned, my head, arms crossed, to look at him. He stood a few steps behind me, his dark hair grown long enough to curl over his jacket collar, hands in his jeans pockets. His face was all but unreadable; inscrutable, to someone who didn't know him as well as I did. Fang and I had the kind of connection you can't get from coffee-shop hook-ups. So I could tell, when those dark eyes rested on my face, that he was as speculative as I was at the moment.

I gave him a half smile. "So are you," I replied. "But then, it's not out of character for you, is it?"

That earned me a hint of a smile. Positively decadent for Fang. It wasn't just everything that we'd experienced. It was just him; just Fang. True to my comment, he didn't speak as he moved forward a few steps to join me by the edge of the cliff. We stood side by side, watching the ocean dash itself against the rocks far below.

"Almost time to move," he observed after a while.

Instantly, regret seeped into my calm. I always hated this part, although I never let the other kids see it. Being leader of our troubled flock often meant hiding how you really felt. Keeping the others strong at the expense of your own. I stifled the sigh rising inside me, turning away from the ocean instead. "Yeah," I said, unable to keep the note of wistfulness from my voice. "I guess so."

Fang sent level eyes my way, picking up on my strange mood. I shook my head and moved off, frustrated with myself. Since we'd taken on the Itex headquarters in Lendeheim, Germany, I'd been more... melancholy, or pensive, or whatever. I didn't like it. It took my focus off things. I didn't think the others had picked up on it, but I couldn't hide it from Fang. He had an irritatingly unerring ability to see through me. If I hadn't been able to do the same to him, it might have bothered me more. We'd had a few moments since our reunion strained with the strange tension of Ari's death resurfacing between us. Ari, my half-brother, had died – _retired_, I thought bitterly – literally in my arms on the parade ground in the heavily fortified Lendeheim compound. It had left a surprisingly coarse, hollow feeling in my stomach, considering Ari and I had only discovered our relation a very short time before his passing, and had spent much of our lives trying to one-up the other. And in our world, that meant kill or be killed.

But I'd saved Ari from an even earlier death than he had suffered only about a week before his death, and I'd given him things he hadn't even imagined beforehand. It had brought us closer. Of course, Fang hadn't been there to witness it. He and half the flock had split, staying in America while Nudge, Angel, Total, Ari and I forayed into Europe for the first time. It was one of the hardest things we'd endured, any of us, the separation. We'd been there for each other in the end – always would be, I told myself firmly – but Fang and I had had some differences of opinion before we split. Both of us had acknowledged since then that we'd made some errors of judgment, but it was hard to bounce back from something like that without a scratch.

But scratches heal.

He moved past me in his quiet, lithe way, and I felt his hand brush my arm in a comforting, fleeting gesture; then he was gone, moving past me towards our little encampment within the trees a little way back from the cliff edge. I could see one of Gazzy's frayed red sneakers hanging down from the middle boughs of a spreading magnolia that dominated the treeline, and, somewhere above him, I could hear the slight snuffle as Total navigated the wide fields of his doggy dreams. Or, in the feisty terrier's case, it was more likely the wide streets of Paris. He'd displayed a particular shine for the classy city when we'd dropped in for a short period before our fated stint in Germany.

Fang's dark eyes met mine for just a moment. "We'll be okay," he said seriously. Then he was past me in a flash of black hair and smooth movement. I stood for a moment in the wake of his passing, and followed him to the treeline, ready to rouse my flock to move on again.

As a collaborative effort, Fang and I had the whole flock out of the treetops and on their feet, if not quite functioning, within ten minutes. True to form, Iggy was the last to be coaxed from the trees, stumbling slightly over the stick Gazzy and Total had been playing with and thoughtlessly left lying in our path. Iggy required somewhat more consideration in that area than the rest of us, due to his blindness, but nobody minded, generally. We'd all grown accustomed to one another's little quirks over the years. But the mornings were harder than any other time. Sleeping in trees does nothing for the harmony of one's peace of mind.

"Gazzy, get out of the way, would you?"Nudge snapped, nearly tripping over him where he crouched over the remnants of last night's fire. There were drooping bags under her pretty brown eyes, which glared now at the mousey-haired little boy on the ground. He'd turned nine not long ago; I frowned. It must be Nudge's twelfth birthday sometime soon as well. We'd have to reach civilisation and a newspaper before we could determine the actual date. It was easy to lose track out in the wild. It just didn't matter so much.

Iggy cursed under his breath and reached down to grope around for the stick to toss it out of the road in irritation. I saw his hand move too far out in one direction and passed conveniently by, nudging it closer to his grasping fingers with a surreptitious foot. His hand closed successfully around it and he threw it out to the side with unnecessary grim satisfaction.

Mornings were always petty.

I sighed, standing hands on hips, overlooking our small group. We milled around, cleaning up bits and pieces of our stay at the edge of the forest. Angel, the smallest of our group – not counting Total, who insisted he was to be judged by dog years anyway, which would technically make him the oldest – appeared at my hip, surveying the rest of the flock with me. Her scruffy omnipresent bear was tucked to her side. Her blonde curls bounced around her tiny heart-shaped face as she turned her clear blue eyes up to me. Her mind was older than that of most six-and-a-half year olds, but then that was only to be expected; beyond the experiences we'd shared, Angel also had the capacity to read and influence minds not her own. A useful talent for the flock's purposes, but sometimes I felt sad for Angel. Human minds are not green fields to play in, and though it had matured her remarkably quickly, I had no doubt that it stole something as well.

She smiled up at me now, as pure and giving as her namesake. Her wide eyes were untroubled this morning, I saw with relief. They'd been disturbingly clouded of late, and I wondered not for the first time what preyed on her young mind. Total nosed at her shins with an affectionate wag of the tail before hurrying off to join Fang where he packed up his computer. She spared him a sweet smile, then returned her attention to me. I narrowed my eyes, more alert. Angel had something to say to me, and despite her younger age, we'd all learned to listen to her early on. After all, she heard things that we didn't. And in our line of work, that came in handy.

"What is it, sweetheart?" I asked, tucking a stray curl behind her ear.

She patted my hand. "Don't worry so much about me," she said reproachfully.

I made a face at her. "Please stay out of my head when I'm worrying about you," I requested wryly. "I like to fret in the comfort of solitude."

"I know you do," she replied absently, looking out over the group again. We were silent again for a moment, watching the group go through the final motions. Finally she turned her clear eyes to me again. "They need a rest," she mentioned conversationally. "_We_ need a rest, Max. Even you." It sounded so strange coming from her sweet six-year-old mouth.

I'd grown better at accepting others' opinions, even when they impacted on my leadership position. And it was always smart to listen to Angel. Especially when I knew she was right. A warm bed and a hot shower weren't exactly anathema to me either. I smiled at my surrogate sister.

"I think you might be right, little sage," I said dryly, putting on my wise Chinese grasshopper voice. I couldn't do it nearly as well as the Gasman, who did impersonations like a lyrebird, but it made Angel smile, so it was worth the slight humiliation. She gave me that angelic look, a pale curl falling into her sweet blue eyes, and moved off to help Gazzy find one last final pocket to squeeze a stray packet of matches into. He grinned at her, giving her a one-armed hug as she approached.

So, I thought, settling my arms across my chest, leaning my weight on one leg as I surveyed the last of the pack-up operation. So, I thought to myself. Tonight, civilisation.


End file.
